The concept of “embracing failure” is big in the tech industry. Fail fast, fail often! is almost an industry mantra. But there’s an everyday type of failure that doesn’t get much attention in the product development process.

That’s right. The humble error message.

We’ve probably all seen an “incorrect password” error once in a while (or, um, daily). While it can be frustrating when things don’t work as expected, we usually just brush it off, no big deal. But what’s the cumulative effect of these small moments?

Each error message is a tiny roadblock that gets in the way of what we were trying to do. Depending on the context, an unhelpful message can be the difference between continuing or giving up. There’s even some research to suggest that there’s a physical stress response: error messages can

On one of my projects I am helping a governmental organisation to take their application forms to the web. They are mostly very complex forms (for reasons). We do our best to help people fill out the forms correctly and identify incorrect input to them where we can. In this post I will go into some ways to do this accessibly.

Commonly, when an error occurs, an error message is inserted into the page. If you want to do this accessibly, some things to look at are identifying errors as errors, notifying the (screenreader) user of new content and describing what happened in clear language. Below, I will go into how you can improve things in those three areas.